The Centre for English Corpus Linguistics and the Centre d'etude des
lexiques romans at the University of Louvain will host an international
conference on phraseology, entitled 'The many faces of Phraseology. An
interdisciplinary conference' on 13-15 October 2005.

CONFERENCE THEME

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in Phraseology, which
has gone from being a relatively fringe discipline to playing a central
role in a wide range of linguistic disciplines such as Lexicography,
Contrastive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Foreign Language Learning and
Teaching and Natural Language Processing. This current Phraseology boom
undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the development of Corpus
Linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the key role of
phraseological expressions in language and also provided researchers with
automated methods of extraction and analysis with which to study them. And
the field of Phraseology itself has also expanded greatly. From
encompassing the study of the most fixed and opaque multiword units,
Phraseology now includes the study of a much wider range of lexical units,
with varying degrees of fixedness and opacity (collocations, recurrent
expressions, pragmatic locutions, colligations etc).

There is a great deal of phraseological research going on, hence the
numerous specialist publications and conferences on the subject. There are
many niche areas of research buzzing with activity. It would seem however,
that there is very little contact between these different areas of
activity. Natural language processing researchers are often unfamiliar with
work related to the typology of phraseological expressions. Researchers
trying to draw up rigorous phraseological typologies are often equally
unfamiliar with work being carried out in the automatic extraction of
phraseological units. Similarly, there is very little contact between
psycholinguistic researchers attempting to define the role of Phraseology
in language acquisition, comprehension and production and educational
researchers aiming to give Phraseology a bigger profile in language
teaching. In general terms, Corpus Linguistics studies describing
phraseological expressions in large computer corpora are undeservedly
little known. This lack of contact between different areas of
phraseological research is problematic for two reasons: first, it means
there is a very real chance of researchers 'reinventing the wheel'; second
and more importantly, it increases the likelihood of researchers coming up
with erroneous data analyses.

The aim of this conference is thus to enable researchers working in the
field of Phraseology to meet other researchers who are studying the same
types of expressions from perhaps quite different perspectives.

Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2005
Dispatch of notifications of acceptance/rejection: 15 April 2005
Deadline for final version (to be included in the proceedings): 15 June 2005
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